I don’t think the cut tags work right in RSS, so I won’t be saying any spoilers here. But I just finished the last three Torchwoods, and all I can say is
WHAT? WHY?
Good shows though. I did not see that coming at all.
I just got a notice from Software Update that it needs to reboot my computer to complete the installation of an update of Safari. Since when is a web browser part of the operating system, Apple?
It’s bad enough you have to reboot when they update Quicktime, but this is just a little stupid.
There’s something wrong. I don’t know what it is. All I know is that in the course of this week, I’ve blown up at the pilots on rec.aviation.piloting for telling lies about Al Gore[1], and then had an even bigger blow up at my best friends in the world on a couple of mailing lists. I’m not just talking about you know, some amusing list that some people read once or twice a day, I’m talking about lists that basically my life revolves around. I read these lists first thing when I wake up in the morning, last thing before I go to be at night, I carry a Treo with a data plan and an imap mail reader so I can read it when I’m walking to the bathroom or at lunch, in business meetings, and during any lull in conversation or any down time at all. I hate to go more than a few minutes between my fixes. Yes, I’m obsessed. Probably in a not very healthy way.
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We knew that today was going to be an amazing day - sunny, temps in the mid 70s, so Rob and I decided to blow off work and go paddling. And we planned it in advance, so we invited the rest of the Huggers Ski Club to go with us, and 5 or 6 others accepted the invitation.
We went somewhere new for me, Black Creek. The put-in is about half way between the Rochester Flying Club tie downs and Vicki’s work at RIT. And the creek runs very close under the approach path for runway 4 at Greater Rochester International Airport. Runway 4 was in use, so every few minutes our conversation was interrupted by a low flying aircraft. Not that I’m complaining, mind.
The river was pretty high, and it had flooded a lot of land, making route finding fun and interesting. Right from the start it we ended up taking wrong turns several times. Even more exciting was near the beginning there was a bridge where the water was so high I had to lie back as flat as I could on the back coaming of the kayak and paddle like that. One or two people just shipped their paddles and pushed themselves along the top of the arch. At another point there was a bit of shallow stream with a strong current coming over it but a tree lying across it making it impossible to paddle, but there was a much longer deep channel. I paddled ahead a few hundred metres and ended up on the other side of the same tree, telling the stragglers where they had to go.
In a lot of ways, it reminded me of some of the times Mom and I paddled through the Minnesing Swamp in spring time.
I couldn’t tell you how far we went, because of all the twists and turns and retracing our steps. But it was a lot of fun, and I think I’ve got a hell of a sun burn to show for it.
Conversation at lunch today between R (been using emacs since 1981) and me (been using vi since 1987). It started off with him saying something about how he knew our latitude and longitude because he had to put it in his emacs config.
Me: When I’m looking for an editor, the ability to tell me sunrise and sunset times isn’t high on my list.
R: Emacs isn’t an editor, it’s an environment.
Me: Emacs isn’t an editor, it’s a lifestyle.
R: Yup. There’s straight, gay, and emacs.
At that point, I was literally laughing out loud (and I mean “literally” literally, not in the internet sense of “I smiled a bit”). I was lucky I didn’t have any food or drink in my mouth at the time.
The main loop query of my waypoint generator app is kind of hairy. And trying to do an “explain” on a typical query shows why it’s so slow.
explain SELECT a.id, c.pdb_id, internalid, a.type, name,
address, state, country, latitude, longitude,
declination, main_frequency, elevation,
b.category, chart_map, tpa, ispublic
FROM waypoint a, type_categories b,
id_mapping c
WHERE a.type = b.type AND
a.id = c.id AND
country in (’US’, ‘CA’) AND
(a.type in (’AIRPORT’, ‘VOR’, ‘NDB’) or
(category = 3 and (chart_map & 7) != 0)) AND
deletedon is null;
QUERY PLAN
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————–
Hash Join (cost=4442.82..19955.46 rows=34752 width=111)
Hash Cond: ((a.id)::text = (c.id)::text)
-> Hash Join (cost=4.83..12938.32 rows=34752 width=107)
Hash Cond: ((a.”type”)::text = (b.”type”)::text)
Join Filter: (((a.”type”)::text = ANY ((’{AIRPORT,VOR,NDB}’::character varying[])::text[])) OR ((b.category = 3) AND (((a.chart_map)::integer & 7) <> 0)))
-> Seq Scan on waypoint a (cost=0.00..10759.48 rows=72467 width=103)
Filter: ((country = ANY (’{US,CA}’::bpchar[])) AND (deletedon IS NULL))
-> Hash (cost=4.37..4.37 rows=37 width=15)
-> Seq Scan on type_categories b (cost=0.00..4.37 rows=37 width=15)
-> Hash (cost=2091.77..2091.77 rows=127777 width=12)
-> Seq Scan on id_mapping c (cost=0.00..2091.77 rows=127777 width=12)
(11 rows)
Adding indexes on country and type doesn’t help. There is still that nasty looking “Seq Scan on waypoint a” line. And also, another “Seq Scan on id_mapping c”, which I don’t understand at all because the joining column, c.id, is a primary key, so shouldn’t there be an index involved?
I’ve got a few ideas on how to use the spatial capability of PostGIS to improve that query, so I’m going to have to run a few tests. The first few ideas I’ve had aren’t showing major improvements in “explain”. It looks like the whole “type in … or ((chart_map & NN) != 0)” is going to force a sequential scan on waypoint no matter what I do. Hmmm.
Ok, I just added some indexes, and now the PostGIS version runs in 45 seconds. Phew! Man, I love “-d:DProf”.
In order to support a new product development I mentioned in an earlier blog post, I re-did my existing waypoint database as a PostGIS geographical database. I also added some foreign keys and some other cleanup that I’ve been meaning to do for a while. But obviously, I don’t want to support two databases, so today I’ve been converting one of my existing waypoint generator perl scripts to use the new PostGIS database instead of the MySQL database it was on before, but without any actual GIS functionality. And Houston? We have a problem. Doing a full US + Canada data load on the MySQL version takes about a minute and a half. Doing the same load on the PostGIS version takes twenty five minutes. Something tells me that I need to make some adjustments here.
The theme I have been using for a couple of years on this blog (Maple) didn’t work very well with Wordpress 2.5 and I can’t find an updated copy anywhere. Since I’ve hacked the shit out of it over the years, I decided it was time to make a fresh start with a theme that’s actually supported. So the first thing I did was copy the default theme, and try to make it look more like Maple. That wasn’t fun, and I’m not 100% satisfied with the results. So I decided to look at other themes.
I couldn’t find what I wanted at the official themes site, mostly because their search engine doesn’t categorize themes by category, and also because their “preview” function doesn’t work. But I found this other site, whose name I won’t mention but it had the word “free” in the URL. I found a bunch of nifty themes there, and downloaded them. I was just customizing one theme to add gravatar support and give the comments an alternating colour scheme, when I noticed something weird down at the bottom. It looked like spam. I grepped the theme code for the spammy urls, and couldn’t find them. But I figured the offending code must be in footer.php. Sure enough, all the themes I’d downloaded from this site had encrypted code in footer.php. I couldn’t read it or decrypt it, but it obviously was there to insert spam code in your blog. I tried replacing the footer.php with one from the default theme, and that broke other stuff. Crafty buggers.
Anyway, I’ve removed all traces of this crap, and I guess we’re all stuck with the psuedo-Maple theme until the official site starts working again.
I upgraded my blog to Wordpress 2.5 because the damn thing was nagging me all the time about being back at 2.3.3. But now I discover that my theme doesn’t work right with the new code, and one of my favourite plugins, the LiveJournal CrossPoster, doesn’t work. Now I’ve either got to find a less ugly theme, or fix the old Maple theme to support the new comment code with the built-in Gravatars.
Update: I might have found the fix for LJXP!
In lj_crosspost.php, change
if(version_compare($wp_version, “2.1″, “< ")) {
require_once(ABSPATH . '/wp-includes/template-functions-links.php');
}
to
if(version_compare($wp_version, “2.3″, “< ")) {
require_once(ABSPATH . '/wp-includes/link-template.php');
} else
if(version_compare($wp_version, "2.1", "<")) {
require_once(ABSPATH . '/wp-includes/template-functions-links.php');
}
Update #2:
I officially hate this update. It keeps adding bogus </code> tags even though my tags are perfectly well closed before I saved them. Let’s try with block quotes instead?
It’s rare for me to get my second paddle of the season so quickly after the first (first was Sunday, second was today, Wednesday), but the weather cooperated and today was chicken wing day in the cafeteria so I wasn’t hungry when I got home, so away I went.
The creek was quite deserted by other boats, except for one flat bottom dinghy that two guys were fishing from. I’ve seen carp mating in that area, so that’s probably what they were after.
Considering that Sunday I saw almost no wildlife except geese, today was a bonanza day. I saw male red-winged blackbirds staking out their territories, several kingfishers patrolling their sections of the river (and raising their crests in alarm when I got too close), a few pairs of ducks, and I finally saw the famous Irondequoit Creek bald eagles. I rounded a corner and saw two soaring birds, one quite high and one just above the ridge line, nd immediately said “oh, turkey vultures”, but then the lower one spread his stunning white tail and I noticed that the head was bright white as well. I never did make out for sure if the higher one was a bald eagle as well, but I think it was. One thing that impressed me was that while it was soaring, it seemed to be moving back and forth much faster than a turkey vulture does. Maybe it’s anti-vulture prejudice, but it just seemed more, I don’t know, purposeful or something.
I also saw a crow or raven down fairly low, but he flew away rapidly as I got near so I didn’t get a good look. There were very distinct primary feathers curling up at the tips, which I think means it was a raven.
I went a little bit further than I did on Sunday, and I wasn’t as tired when I reached the weir, probably because I paced myself better. Probably just as well, because on the way home there were two stretches where I was paddling into a very strong wind. My weather widget says that the winds at the airport are 21G33 knots, or 24 to 33 mph, which I can easily believe. And when the wind is blowing in my face like that, my old canoe trip instincts say “paddle as hard as you can for the lee of the upwind shore, and don’t rest until you get there”, so that’s what I do.
On March 25th, I ranted about a developer who had checked in a bunch of stuff that required a special “upgrade DVD” without telling the other developer that this would be required in Rants and Revelations » Developer dumbassedness. Well, it turns out it’s worse than that. Far worse. Not only didn’t he not tell us about the magic DVD, but he hadn’t even tested the damn DVD. It’s now 2 weeks later, and his DVD *still* doesn’t work.
So now I’m caught in a vice - I had to “rebase” my development environment to the new build in order to deliver some bug fixes, and now my development environment and my test system are at different builds, which makes it hard to test things, and especially hard to use the remote debugger in Eclipse. And I can’t get them back in sync until this damn DVD is ready.
I’d also like to mention that I did a much more ambitious upgrade DVD a few years ago, where his DVD is upgrading from CentOS 5.0 to CentOS 5.1 and reformatting the content partition from ext3 to xfs, mine was upgrading from RedHat 7.3 to CentOS 3.3. And I didn’t leave the rest of the developers out to dry because I tested the hell out of it on my test system, reformatting it back to RedHat 7.3 and running versions of my upgrade script over and over for weeks before I put it into the development stream.
A couple of old friends from my time in the Army Reserve found my picture and post at Rants and Revelations » Lorne Scots SRTP 1979 and have left some comments. It’s great, especially Alex McKelvey’s precis of what happened to nearly everybody. All this time later, it’s hard to remember who you liked and who you hated, and it probably doesn’t matter much now, but Alex was one of the ones I liked.
Well, I got out earlier than last season, but not as early as the previous year. The sun was shining, the air was warm (just a little over 60, I think), the water was freezing cold. All in all, a great day to be out. And obviously I wasn’t the only one, because the creek was crowded with boats, some who looked like they knew what they were doing, some who obviously didn’t. Three teenagers in a canoe lurching from bank to bank with no clue what they were doing (sort of a “sub-prime” canoe), a large gaggle of kayaks coming downstream together, a guy with his feet up on top of his kayak deck and a fishing rod between his feet, people in spiffy paddling jackets and wet suits, and people in t-shirts and shorts.
I wore my wet suit because I knew the water would be cold and I didn’t want to get cold legs on the bottom of the boat, nor did I want to get hypothermia if I tipped. I had planned to only go as far as the weir so I wouldn’t overdo it. But in hindsight I probably should have turned back sooner - I was tired and my elbows were sore by the time I got there. And when I turned back, there was a strong wind in my face countering any assist I was getting from the current.
The weir was impassible - the smaller gaps were jammed with debris, so all the water was flowing through the middle channel, and there was about a foot and a half or two foot drop there. I bet it would have been fun to paddle down, but as tired as I was, I wasn’t going to try paddling up it. I wasn’t even going to try portaging around it so I could shoot it. I just looked at it and said “no f-ing way”. There were a couple of people fishing the eddy below it. So avoiding the lines, I did an eddy turn and turned down stream. I was glad to see that the big mud flat that had sprung up last year just downstream of the weir had submerged again. Hopefully the spring run-off will scour the stream bed a bit deeper this year so it won’t re-emerge in the lower water season.
Not much wildlife in the marsh yet, except some sparrows and lots and lots of Canada geese. Most of the geese looked like they were getting ready to nest, but there was one on a dead tree that lies on its side in the middle of the creek who was playing dead as I splashed by. I wonder if she had eggs? Last year I noticed that a goose had tried to lay eggs on a semi-flat spot on that tree, but most of them had rolled down into a crack, and I guess she’d abandoned the nest. I hope she has better luck this year.
I got an email from one of the sysadmins at NCF saying that the news directory has run out of space. After poking around a bit, I’ve discovered that:
The sysadmin wonders if the cron jobs not running has anything to do with the DST change. The machine is ancient, and running an ancient version of Solaris.
Of course, the fact that I didn’t notice the lack of the daily news admin email in my morning scan-and-delete folder isn’t good, either.
